Description:

Tech Room Description

The GTC Cretheus is a new light cruiser, designed primarily for escorting convoys and vunerable ships. With 8 dual flak cannons, it is capable of taking care of most fighter or bomber threats. Its two powerful engines allow it to keep up with any transport ship and almost match speeds with heavier fighters. When faced with a capital ship threat however, the Cretheus' only advantage is its small size and speed. Without any beam cannons and only light armor, the Cretheus must rely on heavier cruisers for survival. Cretheus Cruisers are typically in groups of two or three so that their spread of flak can cover more area.

Blue Planet: War in Heaven Tech Description

The Cretheus gunboat, officially a Fast Picket, is a small, cheap, agile escort with dedicated antifighter defenses, limited anti-warship ability, and a tortured design history. The prototype was fielded during the Second Incursion, intended as a cheap, numerous escort platform armed with eight flak guns. But the first prototype was lost during its OpEval period in a classified operation on the fringes of the Capella system, and the findings of the loss investigation pointed to unacceptable vulnerability to hostile beam-armed warships. RNI designers protested that the ship was never meant to operate under such conditions, but lobbying by the Akheton Corporation, which hoped to push a variant Mentu design into the light escort role, managed to block the other prototypes from deployment to Capella where, ironically, they might have saved tens of thousands of lives lost to Shivan bombers. The spaceframe was brought back into consideration during the first wave of the Threat Exigency Initiative, but Morgan Technologies asked for it to be held back until it could be packaged with first new fire control systems, then provisions for their new pulse weapons, then improved flak magazine storage. The design entered mass production two years before the Reunion in a number of variants, but the Akheton Corporation again held back its deployment, and it is only now being cycled into the Sol theater where it is intended as a gunship deterrent and point defense picket.

Armaments

Veteran Comments

The Cretheus plays a role in Vassago's Dirge, where it was a powerful yet fragile anti-fighter escort, capable of a quite impressive flak barrage but quickly wiped out by beam armed cruisers.

The BP version of this ship has more than two times the hitpoints (and actually twice that of a Fenris, and a bit more than half of an Aeolus), and a pair of Long Range Flak turrets. If you have a few wingmen with you and a ship a bit more durable than a Serapis, taking one of these gunboats down shouldn't be any harder than a couple of freighters would be. It is a whole different matter though when they're leading an full assault squadron or escorting a capital ship strike force, in which case you will have other priorities, and that flak could just be the one annoyance that will ruin your day. Given how outdated actual cruisers are becoming in the BP tactical environment, those ships may very well replace them entirely in the long run. The only thing that ship does less well than a regular cruiser is, well, surviving, and intercepting bombs - a matter not to forget when facing UEF capital ships and their Apocalypse torpedoes.

I have to strongly disagree with the above comment about normal cruisers not doing anything better than a Cretheus. While the Cretheus is impressive and useful in its designated roles, it has nowhere near the anti-ship capabilities of the Hyperion or even the vanilla FS2 Aeolus. A Hyperion could take out a Cretheus in less than two minutes from nearly 7 kilometers away, long before the Cretheus got in range to do anything. Compared to its UEF counterpart, the Custos, this ship has much better anti-fighter capability, a smaller target profile, and longer range for its weapons, but its anti-ship capability is significantly worse--a Custos has two Warhammer torpedo launchers, which can oversaturate point defenses and do notable damage against smaller capital ships.

Note the actual reference to the Vassago's Dirge prototype in the BP description. The BP team love this kind of half-hidden references to other community campaigns - like, for example, the GTCv Marcus Glaive of Serkr team.